Welcome to the April 30, 2010, 19-th edition of "Bringing more traffic to your blog" Blog Carnival. Some statistics: Submitted Articles - 70. Published Articles - 29. I want to thank all the authors contributing to the issue. Some articles were excluded from the review, since their topic of discussion did not match the main target of the carnival. I am sorry, that not all submissions were accepted, as some of the excluded articles carried a significant value.

Jennifer Saksa presents Blogging by Dictation posted at NCH Software Blog, saying, "An idea to use downtime for your own blogging ideas, or get more people with little time on their hands to help contribute to a blog. More content means more posts means more traffic."

Leineriza presents 2 Reasons Why Teens Prefer Facebook Over Twitter posted at Blogger for Hire, saying, "A recent study says the that teens and young adults are gravitating more towards Facebook than Twitter and blogging. Here are two reasons why they avoid Twitter, and what to keep in mind when engaging them via social media for marketing purposes."

Zhu presents The Art Of Promoting Your Blog | Correr Es Mi Destino posted at Correr Es Mi Destino, saying, "What most people (including me when I first started) don’t realize, is no matter how great your blog is, chances are that if you don’t promote it, people won’t find it. There are apparently over 50-60 millions blogs worldwide and your blog could be lost in a dark corner of the internet forever if you don’t “hunt” for readers."

Luke Geraghty presents The Four Cornerstones of Good Writing posted at Luke Geraghty.com, saying, "We’ve all heard that "content is king" but what separates the lint from the gold? This is a simple guide featuring four tenets that will improve anyone’s writing, which will not only bring more people to your site, but help keep them there."

Norbert Szabo presents SMO Marketing: Is It The New SEO? posted at Web Marketing Strategies, saying, "Did you know that less than 20% of your traffic comes from Google? Learn of the New trends and get engaged into the conversation or you will be left out. As the saying goes: something which can be seen online can be optimized."

Rona Burstein presents Top 50 International Health Care and Nursing Blogs posted at LVN to BSN, saying, "Many people are writing about global health problems, solutions and ideas. If you want to join them, just visit the any one of the top 50 international health care and nursing blogs listed here to learn more about what they do."

While monitoring your trends and stats is one of the most important thing you can do to improve your blog, that might become kind of obsession. Not only it takes your valuable time, if you do that too often, at some point it may become one of the conditions of your personal well-being. Your trends go up – you are happy, down – you are upset and depressed. Is that really productive? Are you happier now, when you have one more condition for your mood changes?

Things Take Time (TTT) and it is one the hardest things to understand while blogging for obvious reasons. Almost all of us at some point of time have watched our blog statistics to get a minute-by-minute idea of how many visits our blog is garnering as analyzed by the various statistics plugins and Google Analytics or StatCounter. It is certainly an enjoyable exercise and one which is hard to resist given the immediate gratification it brings. Here are my views on why worrying inordinately about your blog statistics, hits and blog traffic is not a very good thing to do.

Don’t waste your precious time

Time is money. Many bloggers spend a lot of time watching those stats (often real-time) and getting a lot of satisfaction or tension. More often than not it is tension because everyone wants as many hits as possible and one is rarely satisfied which is normal human behavior. Statistical analyses of your blog(s) once in a while are necessary and desirable but spending a lot of time with it not advisable.

It also gives you tension

You are not getting what you want unlike your rival whose traffic and PR is just shooting upwards! You will only accentuate that painful feeling (aka tension) if you do not control your obsession with your blog’s traffic. Remember, Things Take Time (TTT). Ask any established and successful blogger and they suggest you to concentrate on content and quality more than traffic analyses. Traffic will follow sooner or later. Why torture yourself by thinking about it incessantly?!

You will compromise on quality

Blogging is not just about numbers and hits. If you worry about traffic and blog stats all the time you may end up writing for search engines than human beings. Blog for human beings not for bots. Build your credibility first traffic later. As a matter of fact, traffic is a concomitant of good content and will chase you and your blog though it may take some time.

Slow and steady wins the race

Many successful bloggers today are not fly-by-night online entrepreneurs. They worked hard with their blogs and exhibited a high degree of perseverance. “Between saying and doing many a pair of shoes is worn out,” is a popular Italian proverb. So work more on your blog and less on your stats.

Worrying in moderation is fine

Moderation in all things! As they say you can eat whatever you like as long as it is in moderation. The same sentiments apply here. Do not ignore your blog stats and do not let it get the better of you. Wise bloggers know how to maintain the balance. Be wise and not otherwise!

If you are a proud iPhone owner, using Twitter, you might look for the proper opportunities to read and update your blog from mobile phone. There are quite a few applications filling this users need, but most of the iphone users prefer Twitterrific to tweet from their iPhones.

Twitterrific is a Mac OS X and iphone OS client for the social networking site Twitter. The client, created by The Iconfactory, lets users view in real time "tweets" or micro-blog posts on the Twitter website, as well as publish their own. This application has a simple and clear user interface such that a user can find what he wants on the screen. Tweeting is very simple and it displays the recent tweets from your friends and public in two separate time-lines.

You can read replies and direct messages sent by you and reply to the tweets with a single tap. This application supports photo sharing and updates your location to your friends automatically using the GPS of your device and has built-in mini-browser for showing links.

Note that there are several versions of the application, depending on where you are going to use it: your Mac desktop, iPhone and iPod Touch, and iPad.